Continuous Quality Improvement & Accreditation

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Thank you for visiting the LCME Accreditation and Continuous Quality Improvement Website

As the official accrediting body for medical education programs in the U.S. and Canada leading to the M.D. degree, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) evaluates medical schools about every eight years. The LCME accreditation process provides a valuable opportunity for quality assurance and improvement of our college and our curriculum.

Through Accred the Med, students within the College of Medicine are encouraged and empowered to find their voice and impact positive change.

Dear NEOMED Community,

As many of you are aware, the College of Medicine will be undergoing further review by the LCME in the next several months, following on the 2019 survey for renewal of our accreditation. To that end, there are two major events related to LCME follow-up.

The first, which will take place on July 21 of this year, is a virtual consultation in which the LCME Co-Secretaries will meet with selected institutional representatives to review our plans for addressing the issues that were identified by the LCME in the 2019 survey. The college has been working diligently in preparing those plans and looks forward to receiving feedback about them from the LCME staff. The main purposes of this consultation are to ensure that the plans we have developed are appropriate for addressing LCME concerns, and to clarify LCME expectations regarding successful resolution of those concerns. It is important to understand that this consultation is collegial and designed to be helpful for us; the co-secretaries will not be here to make any evaluations or judgments about what we have done so far. That evaluation will take place during the second major event, a limited survey tentatively scheduled for some time in February or March of 2021.

The limited survey will be a scaled-down version of the 2019 full accreditation survey. Where the 2019 survey examined all areas of the college’s structure, functions, and operations, the limited survey will examine only those issues that were cited by the LCME after the 2019 full survey. There is no institutional self-study involved in the limited survey. Instead of completing an extensive Data Collection Instrument (DCI), we will be compiling a “briefing book” that provides descriptions of what we have done to address the LCME issues, and the documentation indicating how successful (or not) we have been in resolving those issues since the time of the full survey. That visit will most likely take place over a period of a day and a half or two days, and will include meetings of the survey team (three or four members instead of the five-member team that reviewed us in 2019) with students, course and clerkship directors, and other college representatives who have been engaged in correcting the problems that were identified in the 2019 LCME survey.

Details about the July consultation are in the process of being finalized. The details of the limited survey, on the other hand, will probably not be worked out until 4-6 weeks before the dates of that survey, which are still to be determined.

Thank you for your commitment and support!

Elisabeth H. Young, M.D.
VP for Health Affairs
Dean of the College of Medicine
Professor of Internal Medicine

Accred the Med

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